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6.2 Descriptive Data Analysis
This section discusses the general demographic descriptions, demographic features of the respondents, on the basis of the implementation of the four building block shop floor management tools, the two improvement practices and the improvement outcomes.
6.2.1 Demographic description
Table 6.8 shows the sample distribution of survey participants’ qualifications. 77.2%, of the participants reported that they did not attend university; followed by 21.4 % who held a bachelor degree; and a small 1.4% had a masters degree or above. All employees, irrespective of their qualifications were encouraged to contribute in individual improvement suggestions scheme and also to participate in group improvement activities.

In the context of the position held in the company, Table 6.9 indicates that the line supervisor to shop floor worker was 1:10.2 (54 line supervisors to 446 shop floor operators). Thus, there was no considerable difference between the proportions of respondents in the ratio of line supervisors to shop floor operators and the data obtained from the joint ventures official documents for all employees (about 1:8). Additionally, Table 6.9 also exhibits that majority of the respondents (77%) were shop floor operatives, 12.9% were line supervisors and 3.2% managers. It obviously marks that Improvement activities were not dominated by the top and middle management. This is in consonancet with the ideas of Caffyn (1999), Bodek (2002), Bessant and Caffyn (1997) who opined that the employees’ total involvement was one of the critical enablers for implementing continuous improvement.